Judith Rodin (on being the only woman at a meeting of Ivy league presidents): I think they went out of their way to make me feel that it was not going to be any different just because I was a woman. And it was the first time in a long time in my career when I was so aware of being a woman. I never thought about it in so many of the other venues in which I traveled, my academic career—obviously I knew I was a woman. But the more senior I became, the less and less I thought of myself as a woman and the more and more I thought of myself as a scientist and a scholar and an administrator. I felt like a woman again, and it was very odd. And so having you [Shirley M. Tilghman] and [Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons] there, I no longer feel that way. And it has truly changed the dynamics.

A FINE LINE

Shirley M. Tilghman: You know, to be a leader there’s no question you have to have a certain level of aggression. I don’t think you can lead unless you’re prepared to be firm when it’s required and make tough calls when it’s required and deliver bad news when it’s required. And if you are uncomfortable doing any one of those three things, you can’t be effective, frankly, as a leader. But I think all three of those can be done with empathy, with compassion, with grace and without [being] in your face. And I think successful women leaders walk that line and sort of have the agression there under the surface because it’s very necessary to do those things.

Judith Rodin: I think women’s behavior and men’s behavior, if you put the identical behavior side by side, that that which is called aggressive in women may not be called aggressive in men. And I think we have all experienced that; [there is] a narrower range of what is viewed as acceptable. So I have early in my career, both as a scholar and more recently as a leader of an institution, decided not to worry about that—that I was going to try to be an excellent leader, that the attributes that characterized excellent leaders...are very similar in women and men. And that people would have to get comfortable with those attributes being expressed by women and that it was their problem not mine. So that’s sort of been my resolution of what I think is a very real perceptual and attributional issue.

Emily C. Lloyd: I do think that women, again as part of what’s the acceptable range, tend to do some of their toughest things privately, less publicly, than men sometimes do. And that creates a cushion that...”It’s all right if you do it, but I don’t want to have to watch you do it, because I’ll be horrified if a woman’s doing that.” And I think I watch other women, and I do think that they’re less public about some of the tough things they have to do.